Posted
by
Hemos
on Friday October 13, 2006 @08:03AM
from the the-joys-of-running-content dept.

writes "According to WorldNetDaily, Youtube is engaging in censorship. A quote from the article summarizes well:
The popular video-sharing YouTube site, which is being purchased by Google for $1.65 billion, limited access to a political ad that mocks the Clinton administration's policy on North Korea, but contains no profanity, nudity or other factors generally thought objectionable." It's also worth pointing out that WorldNetDaily could be described as just wee bit conservative

If you filter out content based on profanity, isn't that also censorship?

First, censoring is more than just putting up a warning that the content might not be suitable for certain viewers, which is all YouTube did, according to TFA.

Second, also according to TFA, the warning was automatically added once someone offended by the content flagged it as offensive. The warning wasn't permanent, but was just tacked on until YouTube could have a real person review the video to check if it was accurately flagged. Once reviewed, the warning could removed, left in place, or the video could be deleted.

When I just went to watch, there was no warning. This means either the video got to the head of the review queue by normal processes and was determined to have been improperly flagged, or the tempest in a teapot got it jumped to the head of the queue where the determination was made.

As for users flagging it as offensive... I made a political joke in one post at Slashdot and had so many people hitting it with downmods and upmods, I lost my posting privileges for three weeks (a "timeout") for getting too many downmods in a specific time period (almost all from that ONE post). So it's VERY believable that enough left-leaning people would flag such a video as offensive as to trip whatever limit was needed to get the warning placed. I'm also sure something equally offensive to right-leaning people would be equally flagged.

But in the long run, the warning gets on, the video goes into a reviewing queue, and a human at YouTube eventually reviews it. But with the size of their staff, the size of their traffic, and the potential number of videos getting flagged daily, it's highly probable that they'd take a couple of days for it to reach the top of the queue.

Seems that this is more a deliberate publicity ploy. By fooling people who don't actually pay close attention to the facts, they made it sound like the video was unfairly censored by YouTube itself (or its staff) as opposed to going through a standard process. Then those people, with a sense of moral outrage, tell everyone they know... getting the video hundreds of thousands of future viewings.

It's not YouTube per say, it's people flagging the video as inappropriate. That causes the restriction to be put on. Once YouTube became aware of that, they immediately removed the warning. I just watched the video on YouTube.

The question of "why" it gets flagged is even easier to understand, when the post itself includes commentary like

"It's also worth pointing out that WorldNetDaily could be described as just wee bit conservative"

Was this comment absolutely necessary or even relevant to the story? Has free speach suddenly become restricted for a person that is "just a wee bit" one way or the other? The entire point of the accusation of censorship is that any speech at any level was moderated.

Certainly YouTube has rules - no sexually explicit content, fine. But I just read their terms of use and I don't see anything about moderation of content that may be a "wee bit conservative."

Then again, it's like mods on Slashdot (which I believe may have been at least a part of the point of the parent post) which is that given the ability to moderate, people will always mod down speech they don't agree with, completely disregarding said person or organization's absolute right to say it.

Disappointing indeed that the "flagged" content wasn't reviewed by YouTube and simply left be, being that it doesn't violate the terms of use of the site.

No, the point was that a site who has no clue about what is actually going on (nor has the desire to check the facts) is crying "'They' are censoring conservatives". That site happens to be -surprize- conservative.

On top of that, they are crying about something that is really not important to today's politics. Bill Clinton is sooo yesterday's news, and while I'm not in favour of censoring anti-Clinton satire, this seems not very newsworthy.

Well, maybe now isn't the time for blame, but for doing something about it. On the other hand, since blame is being handed out, don't you think it ought to go to the people who gave NK nuclear technology with no weapons inspections for years?

Kim Jong Il has admitted he never followed the agreement that gave him billions of dollars and nuclear components, paid for by American citizens.

You simply cannot negotiate with these people (dictators). It simply doesn't work.

Questions: Was the bomb that went off made of plutonium or uranium? Which was prohibited by the agreement Clinton forged in 1994 and which stayed in force until Bush pulled out of it in 2002? As for "can't negotiate...," what's your alternative?

Wow, I can already tell where you get your news by your dropping slogans like "all carrot no stick." The "stick" we had under Clinton was on-site inspections and cameras installed in NK's reactor(s). The problems arose when NK tried to build another reactor in secret and Bush walked away from diplomacy. For some reason he thinks that diplomacy is a reward for good behavior. In reality, you use diplomacy to impose limits on your enemies through some given and take. The dynamics always change and shady characters like KJI are always going to try topush the limits and cheat. The trick is to maintain your containment. Now, under Bush's "we're taking our ball and going home" approach, we've got a NK testing bombs.
Now, which President is the fuckup?

That looks like a load of crap. Of course there is bias in the media, but they make up their own criteria for what "left", "center", and "right" is. It's not something so easily defined."The fourth most centrist outlet was "Special Report With Brit Hume" on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC's "World News Tonight" and NBC's "Nightly News" to be left of center. All three outlets w

Was this comment absolutely necessary or even relevant to the story? Has free speach suddenly become restricted for a person that is "just a wee bit" one way or the other? The entire point of the accusation of censorship is that any speech at any level was moderated.

It is a tenet of critical reading skills. We always teach our students to "consider the source" when reading and "consider the audience" when writing. Giving the reader a heads-up about any historical political bias is a legitimate act.

I fail to see how free speech has been restricted as you appear to imply. They said it and anybody can read it. If any source has a history of being a wingnut, of any persuasion, policital or otherwise, then potential readers will benefit from knowing.

If any source has a history of being a wingnut, of any persuasion, policital or otherwise, then potential readers will benefit from knowing.

Because a tenet of critical reading skills is to pigeonhole your source, so you can predict what they're going to say in advance. That saves the grubby annoying trouble of deciding for yourself the trustworthiness of the source by, say, examining multiple samples of the source's work.

I know I'm awfully grateful when someone points out the heretics for me in advance.

WorldNetDaily ain't CATO or the Federalist Society. They get pigeonholed because they're hacks, just like some of the more annoying lefty bloggers could be as well (like those 9/11 conspiracy wackjobs - no offense if you actually have some evidence or argument to back up your conspiracy). You work at a shit factory, and nobody's surprised at your product selection.

"Because a tenet of critical reading skills is to pigeonhole your source"

You're right. As I am sure its an unbiased site, lets take a sampling of other headlines from this wonderful site:

Why liberals channel Lucifer
- By Kevin McCullough

The underestimated communicator
- By David Limbaugh(Pro bush article)

More talk won't stop nuclear Iran
- By Jerome Corsi

And regarding the video (did you even watch it?), it was just complete flamebait and should have been blocked. I mean it was from the director of scary movie, aka fart jokes for 10 year olds.. His political intelligence obviously hasnt matured much beyond that.Do you also hate it when people forwarn you about going to goatse links? Or would you prefer that goatse wasn't "pigeonholled"?

However, it is also worth pointing out the pervasive hypocrisy. For example, during all the instantiations of Robert A Kennedy's election conspiracy theories, the +5 modded comments have taught us the error of judging the validity of content by the politics of the source. But when anybody who has committed the grievous error of being conservative has anything to say, we learn about the essentials of using knowledge of bias to sieve information.

In short, people only care about logical fallacies when they're not amicable to their own personal cause.

I guess the writer could have said - "The Conservative WorldNetDaily" instead, but the topic shouldn't be taken serious, so the writer ended it on a non-serious note. People are too sensitive around this time of the year with their Political Menstrual Syndrome. Try not to get all bent out of shape about it.

The best part is that the article explains in detail how the flagging process and review that got it unflagged works, and then goes on to blame the liberals at Google for the users of youtube flagging content.

Both P and GP posts are correct. The video is available with no restrictions or warnings, and the article has this statement,

"Maryrose, of The YouTube Team, said if any video viewer flags a video as inappropriate, it is forwarded to a queue for the company's customer support team to review."

Basically, the WorldNetDaily either is too stupid to understand what happened or is ignoring facts. Either way, it raises questions about their competence and/or honesty. If they are stupid or dishonest about this, then what else are they wrong about?

They might be wrong about this video, but the fact is that plenty of Michelle Malkin stuff has been outright removed *by youtube*. At the same time, the jihadi videos aren't removed, even if they're flagged. While Michelle Malkin may be controversial, the videos that I've seen which were subsequently removed definitely didn't fit any definition of inappropriate.

I went back and carefully read the article again; please note this in the article,

"However, after a brief period of accessibility, the verification page started appearing on YouTube. It asked that: "This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community. To view this video, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up." Today the verification page on the spoof was removed."

From the documentation on youtube.com, when users flag a video as being inappropriate, it is forwarded to youtube employees for review. Therefore, the fact that access to the video was indeed limited for a while indicates that the censorship did come from youtube- at least for a while until that decision was overturned.

Nowhere in that documentation or in the terms of use does it state that in the period between flagging and review by YouTube employees, the content will be available with no warning. The "censorship" only "came from youtube" in that their software automatically adds the warning to flagged content. There was absolutely no decision by anyone at YouTube to "censor" a particular video based on its content.

If I create a document with the text "Bush sucks!" and someone drags it to the recycle bin on my windows

A technology designed to detect copyright material could give YouTube a needed dose of legal legitimacy and calm any concerns Google Inc. has about spending $1.65 billion on the Internet video site. But that same technology could hurt YouTube's edgy appeal.

While YouTube is known as the place to find almost any kind of video clip, recent agreements with h

Uhm - seems to me that YouTube has created a system that allows this to occur. So yeah - it is YouTube.Simple facts are that there has been a whole series of conservative posters having their content removed and or being banned from YouTube. When you look at what was banned you find out that anything containing political speech from the conservative point of view is getting nailed.

So that is suppression of political speech which is supported by the reporting system in place at YouTube.

Please re-read the article. The warning is attached when it is flagged by viewers. It then goes into a queue to await review by a YouTube employee. The YouTube employee then decides what further action to take, such as remove the warning or remove the video

No, the way the process is supposed to work and does work is that when a user flags a video as inappropriate, a warning is immediately put on it, as YouTube wants to err on the side of caution to avoid having the type of conservative groups who think seeing a flash of a nipple on TV will permanently damage any normal person viewing it complaining about how they're a porn site that must be shut down immediately.

If they did this without having a review process that causes each flagging to be reviewed so n

What these people seem to forget, is that everything changed after 9-11. If we just allow anyone to go willy-nilly criticizing a President regarding his foreign policy then the terrorists have won. Plainly, you either agree with the policies of the United States, past and present 100%, or you support the godless terrorists. God bless the good people of You Tube for standing up and saying NO to constitutional rights for treasonous statements defaming the good work of the executive branch of our glorious government. We are in a WAR, and in a WAR, you just CAN'T criticize your government, because that is UNAMERICAN and hurts the feelings of our brave men and women fighting to defend our motherland. Besides, think of the children! This kind of thing is sure to confuse and corrupt them. I say, if there's any doubt, then censor first and let God sort out the details.

Precisely. Had YouTube been some sort of public service channel, censoring something submitted by users would be rather bad taste. However, they're not, and they have every right to chose what kind of material they want to show or not show on their own site.

This is no more censorship than any webforum anywhere on the Internet. Certain things are allowed, other things aren't.

Funny that these conservatives never seem to object to the right-wing bias of the private talk radio industry (which even goes out over public radio spectrum).

What bias of the INDUSTRY are you talking about? Let's not be disingenuous here. Liberals have all the opportunities conservatives do to field talk shows. I've heard them on the air, actually. Several of them.

The problem you have to face is that talk radio, like any other radio format (except perhaps NPR, which shows quite a liberal leaning most of the time), is a BUSINESS. The talkers must gain an audience and keep it, so that the stations can sell advertising.

A factual analysis of the liberal attempts at talk radio show that they just don't make money. It seems there is less of a market for liberals bashing of conservatives than most liberals would care to admit.

One last point: those airwaves are not really public - the stations, via their broadcast license, "owns" a frequency in their market. It's misleading to act like this is analogous to "conservatives can stand on the public street corner and say what they want, but liberals cannot." As I opened my reply, liberal talk show hosts have the same opportunities in the business conservative ones do.

The probably people have with Rush isn't his political stance, it's that he has no trouble lying, and other people repeat these lies.

Seriously, I've listened to him a few times, and, when he talked about stuff I knew about, he was either objectively lying, or at a minimum misrepresenting things. When I say 'misrepresenting' I mean, not in a subjective 'agree to disagree' way, doing shit like comparing 'How many X' there are in two different sized populations, and 'forgetting' to mention that one population was three times the size of another. I'm sorry, but that's lying.

There are at least three ways of being biased: You can selectively report the triumphs of your side and the failures of the other side, you can misrepresent the truth by clever wording and manipulation of facts, and you can lie about actual facts.

All political commentary does the first one. More and more, I see the second done, sometimes by the liberal side, more often by the conservative, but it's possible I'm biased. Either way, I tend to stop listening to such people when I realize they'll say anything that's 'technically' true, no matter how much it misleads people.

But people like Rush, who actually make up facts? Like his recent assertation that the Foley emails were 'planted by a liberal' and that you need abortions to get embryonic stem cells and that Clinton was down to a 20 approval rating at one point and other such inanities. That's way past 'biased' and into 'lying'. Those aren't even vaguely, under any defination, true.

Thinking Rush is 'biased' is part of the problem. He's not presenting an unfair view of reality. He's not presenting reality at all, he's just lying. Not only that, it's been repeatedly documented. Al Franken got a whole book out of it.

Also he says horribly offensive with regard to race and gender, but that's not 'biased' per se, and if people actually like to listen to that, I have no problem with it. WRT the lies, however, I wish someone would sue him for slander.

The video [youtube.com] is up and no longer flagged. A video becomes flagged when enough users mark it and then a YouTube employee will either verify it should be removed/flagged. In this case they removed the initial flag and kept the video.

The video is up and no longer flagged. A video becomes flagged when enough users mark it and then a YouTube employee will either verify it should be removed/flagged. In this case they removed the initial flag and kept the video.

If that is the case, then no problem. According to the article the a video is flagged only when a YouTube employee reviews the video - at the request of the community - and decides that it should be flagged. Do you have any references that say the article got it wrong?

YouTube users can flag any video as containing pornography, mature content or graphic violence, depicting illegal acts or being racially or ethnically offensive. A video is removed -- as Ms. Malkin's was on Sept. 28 -- only if a review by the company's customer support department agrees that it is inappropriate, or that the video is on its face in violation of the site's terms of use.

Actually, according to the article no content is removed without being reviewed, it's given a warning.

Also, according to the article, the flagging was removed before the article was actually posted on the website. That is, the author and editors knew that YouTube wasn't censoring the content and wrote an article about how they were censoring the content anyway. If that's doesn't show dishonesty and a complete lack of journalistic integrity, I don't know what does.

YouTube has a mechanism in place whereby users can mark a file as "objectionable". Because of a possible flaw in this system, a file was allowed to be marked inappropriately for a nonzero length of time. It is reasonable to assume that YouTube is responsible for their own code.

And plenty of posts in this thread have been moderated inappropriately, with "overrated" and "flamebait" and "offtopic" tags used on this that are merely alternate viewpoints.

I don't blame/. for this, despite the fact that they are responsible for their own code. Allowing public input in moderation always introduces the possibility of intentional manipulation. If there was a story here at all, it would be a piece on the overall phenomenon, with reference to Slashdot, Wikipedia, and of course YouTube. It would also have views of people on the other side, where the benefits of such a system can be explained as well.

I don't know about anyone else, but that video is very persuasive. Its intelligent and serious perspective on the issues has made me realise how the current situation with North Korea is actually the fault of the Democrats. I suggest everyone watches it to see the quality of discourse on the Republican side of this debate.

Youtube is a "private" site. It can, and obviously will, censor whatever the hell it will.

There is no constitution on the Internet. There is no free speech. There is only the right to say whatever the hell you want, and hope someone will listen to you. If they don't, too bad.

That said, I don't approve of censoring anything. I think it's cowardly and serves no real purpose other than to shield people from things they may not necessarily want to be shielded from. But it IS the right of youtube to chose what they want to have on their site, and what the don't want. Obviously, they don't want people being overly political. That's their call.

Does anyone else get the feeling that the Slashdot userbase is more conservative than the rest of the population? Bush's approval rating hovers around 35%, but the number of uprated pro-Bush comments on recent political posts is astonishing. Apparently, intelligence and critical thinking don't go hand in hand. Economics is always debatable, but how does any thinking person look at the Bush foreign or social policy and see anything but corruption, insanity, and abject failure?

Heh, sure. But there are degrees; Bush 41 is clearly less insane. I'm just happy for the one redeeming feature of the US electoral system: I live in New York, so I don't feel the obligation to vote for idiots like Kerry or (gag, please god no, don't run in 2008) Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, it is somewhat depressing that the outcome is inevitable before the candidate is even picked.

The censorship comes from the culture of the users at YouTube. It works the same way in real life verifying the importance of the 1st amenendment.
Movies that draw full theaters in NY and LA bomb when released nation wide. Pro-Abortion activists have poor results speaking in southern towns. Bush avoids the NAACP convention, Clinton avoids predominately white churches.
While I don't use youtube, I suspect the audience is not friendly to content they don't agree with. I suspect Google and YouTube want everyone to participate, but like slashdot unpopular opinions get shouted down.

YouTube is not, in my mind at least, capable of censoring. YouTube is a private enterprise, not the Government. You have no First Amendment recourse against YouTube. As there is no recourse, there is no censoring.

Disclaimer: I vote my way, that tends to be conservative, but I have voted for Democrats in the past, such as Clinton in 1992.

They have banned several Conservative video makers, including Michelle Malkin and HotAir. They have done so recently, despite carrying the videos for over a year without any issues.

Now, Google, the company that bought them, has refused to carry Michelle, LFG, and others as NEWS sites based on the fact that they blog, not present new news. Here are the letters from Google:

Hi Michelle,

Thank you for your note. We have reviewed www.michellemalkin.com but cannot include it in Google News at this time. We do not include news-related blogs or other news-related sites that are written and maintained by a single individual. Similarly, we do not include sites that do not have a formal editorial review process. We appreciate your taking the time to contact us and will log your site for consideration should our requirements change.

Regards,The Google Team

And LGF:

Hi Charles,

Thank you for your note. We reviewed http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog [littlegreenfootballs.com] and cannot include it in Google News at this time. We do not include sites that are purely news aggregators, and we were not able to find any stories on your site that were not from outside sources.

We will log your site for consideration should we alter our policy. Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.

Regards,The Google Team

BUT they allow several other blogs to be indexed as news, as Charles from LGF points out:

Note that the Google News index now searches quite a few blogs (including Power Line, Polipundit, and Wonkette) and includes other sites with, to say the least, serious credibility problems (including hard-core anarchist site Infoshop, and Justin Raimondo's paleocon antisemitic site antiwar.com). In this context, Google's reply to me seems rather odd.

Other sites of questionable news worthyness but indexed as news: Democratic Underground, Uruknet.info, and Dailykos.

Now if you want to hold yourself out as a "News" indexing service that only indexes news and claim no bias, you have serious issues. Lets point out that Google donates almost exclusively to Democrat candidates and causes and you have a clear bias.

A clear bias when you claim to have none is a problem

I am resonably convinced, barring YouTube or Google coming out and saying it, that they scrubbed the videos as part of the merger deal. As in, no scrub, no deal.

So, unless someone toes a liberal party line their opinion has no value?

The problem is that this article seems to be primarily opinion oriented. Meaning it doesn't have a lot of news content.

Frankly, after reading this, I must say that this is more an opinionated editorial than an objective piece of news. I'm shocked that/. would select this report of YouTube censorship instead of another article from a more reputable news source

The problem is that this article seems to be primarily opinion oriented. Meaning it doesn't have a lot of news content.

I'm shocked that/. would select this report of YouTube censorship instead of another article from a more reputable news source

Again, to reiterate the GP's post, WND is not a reputable news source because it's conservative?

You can call this an opinion piece if you'd like, but stating FACTS like the video was available for viewing on YouTube is reporting, not editorial. From the FTA:

limited access to a political ad that mocks the Clinton administration's policy on North Korea, but contains no profanity, nudity or other factors generally thought objectionable.
What in that statement is OPINION?

Further into the article, we get:

"However, after a brief period of accessibility, the verification page started appearing on YouTube. It asked that: "This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community. To view this video, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up." Today the verification page on the spoof was removed."

I have to say, that seems like some decent FACTUAL reporting.

(1) They state that the verification page was present due to USERS ratings.
(2) The point out that the verification page has been removed.

subjective, let's see a quote from a blogger"Perfectly OK to show our soldiers getting killed, but they'll be damned if they allow that anti-democrat ad," added "Spaceman Spiff" in a "Newsbusters online dialogue. "This [is] very scary to me. However, not surprising. But, now that they are owned by Google, we'll certainly be seeing a lot more of this censoring."

let's see this quote from the articleSheffield said he believes the intention of YouTube's "censorship squad" was to limit access. Even though the same
video may be available somewhere else, such as the Drudge Report, "lots of non-political and moderate folks don't read Drudge, but they might hear about the video from a friend and try to look it up in the search engine, only to be foiled in their attempts to decide whether it was truly 'objectionable.'"

and another gem of reportingBloggers also reported that the Council on American Islamic Relations has in the past taken steps to have anti-radical Islamist videos pulled from the YouTube site, and Malkin said she was told her video was pulled because it was "inappropriate."

This article is an opinion piece, it looks nothing like a factual article. It uses quotes form unknown bloggers as evidence. It presents only one side of the story. It does not try for even a second to be objective.
For a factual article, it does not know when the movie was posted, how long it was freely availble, how long it was restricted and when it came unrestricted again. It makes a big deal out of nothing because youtubes policy is to investigate after someone marks a video as objectionable. These idiots would be all over youtube if they ran a different policy because children could be potentially exposed to nudity.

This article is about a censorship that is not even a censorship but the normal processes at google.
This article simply attempts to resell the story to the American public that the media has liberal bias.

Slashdot's moderation system is a form of censorship. Opinions that don't follow the anti-Microsoft, anti-American party line are regularly censored. People on Slashdot will complain about free speech zones and then mod down posts that they simply don't agree with. Happens all the time.

100% censorship free is not only impossible, its not acceptable. I'm not saying we should be censoring things we don't agree with, but its inevitable that things considered offensive will eventually be censored by the community in one form or another. Remember, just because you have free speech doesn't mean you get to stick it in my face.

Hilarious that you got modded up for this. I fully expect it to get to +5. Did you see, for example, the recent global warming post? Something like 80% of the +5 comments were of the fringe global warming "skeptic" view. The notion that the prevailing view of Slashdot moderators is "anti-American" (ie liberal, translating from dittohead speak) is absurd. Perhaps the editors are mostly liberal, but the community has quite a large number of right-libertarians.

Gimme a break, Slashdot is overwhelmingly "left wing"... every once in a while a libertarian/conservative post gets modded up but it's fairly rare. Generally if an article is posted, the same 120 bland nonthinking comments are posted because everyone is afraid of getting moderated downward. This place is just a shrill greek chorus to the political bias of the editors.

I don't think that word means what you think it means, sir. With two clicks I can see every -1 post in this whole discussion. You're a long-time user that ought to know this, you should be ashamed of yourself for calling the moderation system something that it is not.

Also, if you don't see any Microsoft apologists on this website, even browsing at +4, you are not paying attention at all. In general there is an anti-MS bias around here, but if you open your eyes you'll find the dissenting opinions.

On behalf of slashdotters with a clue, thank you for contributing to the dilution of a perfectly good word. Henceforth, let's associate "censorship" to mean "viewing threshold" on a stupid interbutts forum. That way, when REAL censorship happens, nobody will care.

C'mon... I metamoderate as much as possible, it's the only check of censorship in this place. It's the one thing I applaud this site for. But you're dreaming if you don't think that unpopular opinions aren't moderated ALL THE TIME with the express purpose of censoring unpopular opinions. Also remember that liberal idiots like Kdawson are editors and have unlimited moderation points... and if you don't think the Slashdot editors aren't politically biased then you are blind or just willfully ignorant.

You need to work on your reading comprehension, sir. My issue with the grandparent is the mis-use of the word "censorship". I'm not denying that unpopular opinions get moderated down, I'm saying that moderation is not censorship. Additionally, the tools exist for users to read whatever unpopular posts that they like. You don't have to browse at the default threshold.

"Wouldn't surprise me too much if this were true; but in either case the audience of youtube is so predominately young and radically liberal, that even if there was more conservative-friendly material on that site it would all get rated out of existence pretty quickly, methinks."

These are Republicans, not conservatives. It's really not wise to confuse to the two. Republicans only believe in rights for Repbulicans. Anyone who's not Republican (or voting for them) should not be entitled to any rights, especially the right to vote.

You might think my comments are a little extreme, but here's a transcript from Politically Incorrect [cygnus-study.com] where Ann Coulter specifically states women shouldn't be allowed to vote because they tend to vote for Democrats.

Yes, it is. It is a salient addition to the discussion. You may argue which way certain mainstream media outlets lean, but when the source is particularly partisan (say, the Washington Times, or The American Prospect) it should be noted that there is celarly an agenda behind the outrage.If/. ran a story about new scientific research that differences in language usage could affect the way you view food and the total amount of calories your body feels it needs, would you be curious? If the editor noted that

One should always consider the source when reading articles. I don't think it's unreasonable that the summary points out the possible conservative bias of the source since most people here have probably never heard of this source.

Here on/. you can filter most of the political articles. Turn off the politics and YRO sections. Your problem is solved.

Slashdot is now entering the field of discriminating against conservative news sources by tagging them as such.

It's called context, shit-for-brains. It's like if some pro-alien-invasion newspaper said that NASA was hiding information about aliens. You would think differently about it if the Wall St. Journal said the same, thing, no? It's still up to the reader to decide if the information is reputable or not. You'll notice that the editor's comment simply says that the article comes from a periodical